30 logical magnets, that's all it amounted to, Roma hoped. That was dangerous enough. Even in the beginning Mr. Ray never smiled. He'd turned up their very first day, assigning himself to them as a prophet of misfortune. His work shirt, done up to the top button, made a tight noose at his Adam's ap- ple, so that the veins stood out on his neck. His wife, Roma heard, was housebound with emphysema. There was no formal introduction, but words began to pass as if in acknowledgment of proximate habitation. "It'll cost some plenty keeping all those horses through the winter." Roma had allowed that it would. They were opening a riding stable. "Abe's Choice" they'd named it which meant any of the seven horses in their barn, first come, first served. From the start, Mr. Ray watched the operation with interest, observing the lameness, tardy shoers, eager vets, and customers who misused the horses, galloping on the gravel roads. The stable had been a clinker. Even Abe admitted his mistake. The local people who could afford horses already owned them. Roma wound up muck- ing the stalls and packing sandwiches for city cowboys who came for one-day thrills, the same people who might hire a raft to squeeze excitement from the Shenandoah's meagre rapids, or climb the rocks at Great Falls. After three seasons the horses were sold to a summer camp. By then Roma had a second child, Clayton, and was pregnant with James. She had little time for stable duty anyway. When Abe announced they would grow grapes in their field it seemed a sensi- ble switch. Trellises replaced the horses in the pasture. "Don't fight the earth," they were advised. "Find a grape that's comfortable with your soil." They chose the Chardonnay, convenient for sale to the local winery. Abe pruned and tied his vines with a gentle care. Out of season they looked so sere and brittle it was hard to believe they could bear. And then one summer the grapes appeared, a beautiful canopy of pale green. They had some fine years before a fungus wiped out a whole crop and then killed every vine. "The grape cancer," their man at the winery called it In the midst of their troubles Roma heard Mr. Ray tell a sombre crowd in the corner store, "Enough drunkenness in the country without MAN FEEDING PIGEONS It was the form of the thing, the unmanaged symmetry of it, of whatever it was he convoked as he knelt on the sidewalk and laid out from his unfastened briefcase a benefaction of breadcrumbs-this band arriving of the unhoused and opportune we have always with us, composing as they fed, heads together, wing tip and tail edge serrated like chicory (that heavenly weed, that cerulean commoner of waste places) but with a glimmer in it, as though the winged beings of all the mosaics of Ravenna had gotten the message somehow and come flying in to rejoin the living: plump- contoured as the pomegranates and pears in a Della Robbia holiday wreath that had put on the bloom, once again, of the soon to perish, to begin to decay, to reënter that dance of freewheeling dervishes, the breakdown of order: it was the form of the thing, if a thing is what it was, and not the merest wisp of a part of a process-this unravelling inkling of the envisioned, of states of being past alteration, of all that we've never quite imagined except by way of the body: the winged proclamations, the wheelings, the stairways, the vast, concentric, paradisal rose. - AMY CLAMPITT . help from Worton." Telling this to people who would normally ask Roma how ... be was doing and if the children were over their colds. As though he had a stake in their failure. "Remember" A b e told her "we , , didn't come here to get rich." He im- ported thirty head of sheep from a neighboring county. They would tend an innocent flock and maintain domin- ion over their property while they waited for a new five-year plan. Eventually, Abe announced the new CD - - tf ' , ;A . It , J I \ \ I .. - .... , , , , 11 fTI \... ..... ............. , . cJ.. crop would be asparagus. He tore out the failed vines, and began to dig long trenches that had to be filled with layers of gravel, sand, and topsoil be- fore he could set in the asparagus crowns. As the shoots came up, he would add more topsoil and fertilizer according to schedule. To keep the sheep off the asparagus beds, there would have to be paths. This meant fencing the ex-vineyard into quadrants with sheep runs be- tween them. The first run would take the animals from the little barn, where they'd be sheltered at night, to the watering trough on the far side of the field. Another run would go from the pen behind the house, where shearing and dipping would be done, to the adjacent field, a rocky pasture where Mr. Ray's boss had agreed to let them graze for a nominal fee. To hedge their bets and keep their heads above water, Abe started a little classified- advertising sheet, Abe's Country